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Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

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Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#41
post #39

Is there a frozen client that someone could audit for assurance, then repeatedly use with your TEE-hosted backend? If instead users must use your web-served client code each time, you could subtly alter that over time or per-user, in ways unlikely to be detected by casual users – who'd then again be required to trust you (Tinfoil), rather than the goal on only having to trust the design & chip-manufacturer.

Yes, we have a customer who is indeed interested in having a frozen client for their app, which we're making possible. We currently have not frozen our client because we're in the early days and want to be able to iterate quickly on functionality. But happy to do so on a case-by-case basis for customers.

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#42

Looks great. Not sure how big the market is between "need max privacy, need on-prem" and "don't care, just use what is cheap/popular" tho. Can you talk about how this relates to / is different / is differentiated from what Apple claimed to do during their last WWDC? They called it "private cloud compute". (To be clear, after 11 months, this is still "announced", with no implementation anywhere, as far as I can see.)…

Private Cloud Compute has been in use since iOS 18 released.

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Big tech providers already offer confidential inference today.

Last I checked it was only Azure offering the Nvidia specific confidential compute extensions, I'm likely out of date - a quick Google was inconclusive. Have GCP and AWS started offering this for GPUs?

GCP, yes: https://cloud.google.com/confidential-computing/confidential...

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#45
Thats impressive, congrats. You've taken the "verifiable security" concept to the next level. I'm working on a similar concept, without "verifiable" part... trust remains to be built, but adding RAG ad fine tuned modelds to the use of open source LLMs, deployed in the cloud: https://gptsafe.ai/

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked it was only Azure offering the Nvidia specific confidential compute extensions, I'm likely out of date - a quick Google was inconclusive. Have GCP and AWS started offering this for GPUs?

GCP, yes: https://cloud.google.com/confidential-computing/confidential...

Azure and GCP offer Confidential VMs which removes trust from the cloud providers. We’re trying to also remove trust in the service provider (aka ourselves). One example is that when you use Azure or GCP, by default, the service operator can SSH into the VM. We cannot SSH into our inference server and you can check that’s true.

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#47

> https://docs.tinfoil.sh/verification/attestation-architectur... I tried taking a look at your documentation, but the site search is very slow and laggy in Firefox.

Interesting, we haven't noticed that (on Firefox as well). We'll look into it!

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#48
post #47

> https://docs.tinfoil.sh/verification/attestation-architectur... I tried taking a look at your documentation, but the site search is very slow and laggy in Firefox.

Interesting, we haven't noticed that (on Firefox as well). We'll look into it!

It looks like it might be the blur effect in a VM with no Firefox video acceleration. Also, email to support@tinfoil.sh (from "contact" link) just bounced back to me.

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#49
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, we haven't noticed that (on Firefox as well). We'll look into it!

It looks like it might be the blur effect in a VM with no Firefox video acceleration. Also, email to support@tinfoil.sh (from "contact" link) just bounced back to me.

Ah we don't have support@tinfoil.sh set up yet. Can you try contact@tinfoil.sh?

Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

#50
post #39

Is there a frozen client that someone could audit for assurance, then repeatedly use with your TEE-hosted backend? If instead users must use your web-served client code each time, you could subtly alter that over time or per-user, in ways unlikely to be detected by casual users – who'd then again be required to trust you (Tinfoil), rather than the goal on only having to trust the design & chip-manufacturer.

> rather than the goal on only having to trust the design & chip-manufacturer

If you'd rather self-host, then the HazyResearch Lab at Stanford recently announced a FOSS e2ee implementation ("Minions") for Inference: https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2025-05-12-security / https://github.com/HazyResearch/Minions

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